Evolution Will Be the Death of Me

Next time someone tells you that evolution is a lie, remind them that natural selection occurs every day. Take, for instance,staph infections:

Dangerous drug-resistant staph infections are showing up at an alarming rate outside of hospitals and nursing homes in the United States.

New research found that in one part of the country, as many as one in five infections were picked up out in the community.

And how did that happen? Oh, let's see -- the bacteria that have mutated to be resistant to drugs multiply while the others die off. Survival of the fittest, right?

Speaking of dying off, this article from New Scientist (my new favorite magazine, by the way) makes an assertion that I had never considered. I've always thought of developments like opposable thumbs as the great fruits of evolution's efforts. Perhaps evolution's greatest achievement is not how we live but how we die::

This is most obvious in the many varieties of programmed cell death or apoptosis, a self-destruct mechanism found in every multicellular organism. Your hand has five fingers because the cells that used to live between them died when you were an embryo. Embryos as tiny as 8 to 16 cells - just 3 or 4 cell divisions after the fertilised egg - depend on cell death: block apoptosis and development goes awry. Were it not for death, we would not even be born.

[snip]

The cells of all higher organisms begin to age, or senesce, after just a few dozen cell divisions, ultimately leading to the death of the organism itself. In part that is one more protection against uncontrolled growth.

Everyone at some point will try to comfort themselves and/or others by saying that death is part of life. To expand on that, perhaps we should see death as the one evolutionary trait we have that we share. Not everyone sees, hears, behaves, smells, or thinks the same; birth is different for every one of us. Death, on the other hand, is the same for everyone. It's suddeness or mode is inconsequential. When you're dead, you're dead.

Arguments and wars over religion boil down to the afterlife, don't they? "I'm going to heaven because I am God's chosen, so I deserve life more than you." How sad.

At the risk of sounding nihilistic: perhaps death is the only part of life that is important because it renders everything that precedes it utterly meaningless. We all just die. We're stuck here for now, so let's enjoy it, okay? And if we're going to work at anything, let's work and making sure that everyone enjoys it, okay? Okay?

The prospect of nothing after this mortal coil is actually quite comforting to me. To read that death is an important evolutionary development just affirms that for me.